Jefflog

June 7 is the day scheduled for Hong’s C-section, so unless she goes into labor earlier than that, that’s the day our baby son will arrive. That’s only 2 weeks away! We’ve been taking steps the last few weeks to get ready for the big day.

We’ve been getting a number of house chores squared away, either by doing it myself, or by hiring someone to do it for us. We don’t want to have to worry about these things with a crying infant.

We’re already looking in nanny options. Our current nanny who watches Maggie has been absolutely wonderful, but she is pregnant herself now! We put an ad in the newspaper and have been getting plenty of phone calls through the week. If that doesn’t work, we might look into an au pair. It doesn’t make any sense to send them to daycare, since we both work from home and daycare would be almost as expensive anyway.

I’ve also given up my daily caffeine ritual for now. I figure that if I can give up coffee now, then I’ll be able to drink caffeine when I really do need to stay awake and it’ll have more of an effect. Despite some initial sluggishness and a caffeine headache on the second day of withdrawal, I’m doing pretty good, perhaps even better than when I was drinking two cups of coffee a day. (Note: those are 12 ounce cups, not the 6 ounce cups that packaging usually refers to as a “cup of coffee”.) However, since then I have compromised a little and treat myself to a cup of tea in the morning.

Four new movies of Maggie posted. Check them out.

With this posting, I’ve taken down the Quicktime streams. Getting them encoded in Quicktime was a real pain in the first place, and when I rebuilt my Windows machine, I lost my Linux partition I was using to encode videos. All videos are using the Theora format exclusively.

Yesterday, we woke up to a calm sunny day, but the afternoon brought a violent hailstorm. In mid-May!

You can see the plot for our vegetable garden in the back. Just the day before, I had transplanted some bell pepper and Chinese eggplant plants that I had started inside about six weeks ago. Now who knows if they’ll survive.

Last week, I had the unfortunate task of rebuilding my Windows machine at work from scratch. I was attempting to upgrade a vendor-supplied component and was getting an error every time I tried to install it, no matter what I tried. After six hours of trying, I figured there must be something wrong with my computer, rolled up my sleeves, and began the task of backing everything up, wiping the hard drive clean, then restoring everything.

What a painful process that was. It takes several hours just to get all of the Microsoft patches downloaded and installed. Naturally, I’ve got a bunch of other utilities I use on a daily basis, so I had to install those as well. Then I have to reconfigure all of my programs just the way I like them. This last step could have been avoided by copying my local settings directory, but I figured it would be better to start fresh. All in all, three days of productivity wasted.

What’s more, it didn’t solve the original problem of installing the vendor component! I was able to figure out the source of the error, though, and when I contacted the vendor, they said, “Oh, that looks like a bug…”. Sure is!!

On the plus side, my system runs faster than ever. After using Windows for two years, no doubt it had collected a lot of cruft along the way. Maybe it had collected some spyware too; although I’m usually very careful about what I download and keep my security patches and firewall settings up to date, nasty things could have still gotten though.

Here’s another plus: I discovered Google Desktop. I just happened to be downloading it on the day they released their latest version. The new sidebar is very nice, and uses far less memory than Yahoo! Desktop Widgets (neé Konfabulator). I was always annoyed that Yahoo! Desktop Widgets could eat up 10 or 20 megabytes of memory PER WIDGET. The Google taskbar, on the other hand, seems to be very conservative, only taking about 18 megs while running 8 widgets, and that’s including the search-index crawler in the background indexing my files. It’s not as pretty as Yahoo! Desktop Widgets, but the eye candy isn’t worth an extra 100 megabytes to me.

An addendum to yesterday’s post: this morning, we went outside and again found that the nest had fallen off the fence. This time, no sign of the baby birds or its mother. We don’t know what happened to the birds or whether they are safe or not. We put the nest back but it remains empty.

This spring, one mother bird decided to build her nest on the corner of our backyard fence. We started seeing an empty nest, then eggs. They hatched last week, and now there are four baby birds. We’ve been watching them every day, although the mother bird gets quite agitated whenever we get close.

When I went to go check on them this morning, the nest was missing! As I got closer, I saw that the nest had fallen down and all the birds were on the ground, helpless, unable to move. I put on some gloves, carefully scooped up the birds into the nest, and put the nest back on the fence. They seem to be okay now, as evidenced by this photo taken this afternoon.

At 20 months, Maggie likes to be involved in everything we’re doing. Whether it’s cooking, cleaning, biking, weeding, or going to the office, Maggie wants to do it all.

She’ll typically announce this by intoning in a loud voice “Maggie do it!”. At this point, we’ll let her try (putting on her shoe, eating food with a fork, wiping the table). When she realizes that she can’t do it, her next sentence will be “Daddy do it!” or “Mommy do it!”

We’ve reached the stage where we have to be careful what we say around her. More than once, we’ve used the word “stupid” (NOT referring to Maggie, by the way), and she’ll say “tupid” or some other adorable mangling of the word. Still, we don’t want her to get in the habit of saying the word “stupid”, because of course she doesn’t know when it’s appropriate to use certain words.

To take a prime example, when we’re eating at a restaurant or out shopping, she will often point at people and say “man!”, “woman!’, “baby!”. Sometimes she gets it wrong, saying “boy!” while pointing to a girl. Sometimes she’ll point at a random man and say “Daddy!”. The last thing we want her to do it start pointing fingers and saying “stupid!”